12 Summer poems

Yesterday, the sunshine made the air glow pushing me like a sixteen-year-old to toss my shirt off, and run along the river shore, splashing in the water, wading out to the reeds, my heart an ancient Yaki drum and I believed, more than believed, the air beneath trees was female blue dancers I approached, and there in the dry leaves, in the crisp twigs, I turned softly as if dancing with a blue woman made of air, sunlight, in shrub-weed skirts. I knew the dance that would please the Gods, I knew the dance that would make the river water smile glistening ever silvering, I knew the dance steps that praised my ancestors. Yeah, I wanted to write you a poem woman for two days, and today it was gray and snowy and overcast, about how I startled the mallards from their shallow refuge beneath the Russian olive trees and how the male purposely came close to me diverting my attention to it its female love went the other way risking its life, that's what I saw, the male fly before the hunter's rifles, circle in sights of hunters and take the shots, the roaring rifle blast after blast and circle beyond over the fields to meet its female companion. That's how I miss you, that's how I wanted to write you a poem since we left you one way me another way. I was the male taking with me the hunters that would harm you risking my heart so yours wouldn't be hurt, fronting myself as possible prey so you could escape, that kind of poem I am writing you now. Circling as hunters aim down on me while you rise, rise, rise into the blue sky and meet me over in the next fields. I wanted to write you a poem for two days now to tell you how happy I was, seeing a white crane arc between banks in the irrigation ditch with furious efforts, its big wings flapping like an awkward nine-year-old kid much taller than the others his age with size twelve sneakers flapping down the basketball court. But once the white crane found its balance, its wings their grace, it glided more perfectly than a ballet dancer's leap across air, all of its feathers ballet dancer's toes, all of its feathers delicate dancers all of its feathers, in motion made me believe in myself, but more, when it rose, swooped up, the line of ascent up made me think of the curve of your spine, how I traced my finger down your spine when you slept, your spine is the ascent of the crane toward the sunshine, and my hands my face my torso and chest and legs and hips became air, a blue cold artic air you glided up in your song of winter love.

A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk, and like midwives and undertakers possess a weird authority. Crickets leap from the stubble, parting before me like the Red Sea. The garden sprawls and spoils. Across the lake the campers have learned to water ski. They have, or they haven’t. Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!” Cloud shadows rush over drying hay, fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine. The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod brighten the margins of the woods. Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; water, silver-still, and a vee of geese. * The cicada’s dry monotony breaks over me. The days are bright and free, bright and free. Then why did I cry today for an hour, with my whole body, the way babies cry? * A white, indifferent morning sky, and a crow, hectoring from its nest high in the hemlock, a nest as big as a laundry basket ... In my childhood I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet, waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away. The damp dirt road gave off this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps. Spruce, inadequate, and alien I stood at the side of the road. It was the only life I had.

Sweet smell of phlox drifting across the lawn— an early warning of the end of summer. August is fading fast, and by September the little purple flowers will all be gone. Season, project, and vacation done. One more year in everybody’s life. Add a notch to the old hunting knife Time keeps testing with a horny thumb. Over the summer months hung an unspoken aura of urgency. In late July galactic pulsings filled the midnight sky like silent screaming, so that, strangely woken, we looked at one another in the dark, then at the milky magical debris arcing across, dwarfing our meek mortality. There were two ways to live: get on with work, redeem the time, ignore the imminence of cataclysm; or else take it slow, be as tranquil as the neighbors’ cow we love to tickle through the barbed wire fence (she paces through her days in massive innocence, or, seeing green pastures, we imagine so). In fact, not being cows, we have no choice. Summer or winter, country, city, we are prisoners from the start and automatically, hemmed in, harangued by the one clamorous voice. Not light but language shocks us out of sleep ideas of doom transformed to meteors we translate back to portents of the wars looming above the nervous watch we keep.

In the dog days of summer as muslin curls on its own heat And crickets cry in the black walnut tree The wind lifts up my life And sets it some distance from where it was. Still Marco Polo Airport wore me out, I slept in a plastic chair, took the water taxi. Early, too early the voices of children Mimicking the clatter in the Internet café In Campo Santo Stefano in a place of black coffee Bordellos of verse, bony accolades of joy, Saint Stephen stooped over a cross, A dog licking his heel, blood drops from a sign By the church wall—Anarchia è ordine— The refugee from Istria gathers up nails. She will cobble together a gondola with bits of driftwood Cast off the shores of the hunger-bitten Adriatic. In wind off the lagoon, A child hops in numbered squares, back and forth, back and forth, Cap on his head, rhymes cool as bone in his mouth. Whose child is he? No one will answer me. Voices from the music academy pour into sunlight That strikes the malarial wealth of empire, Dreams of an old man in terrible heat, Hands bound with coarse cloth, tethered to a scaffold, Still painting waves on the walls of the Palazzo Ducale.

Dog days doggone dog-tired dogwork of summer, mowing the grass we're all coming to the dog tags of you, me, I, we, stashed in a box, doghouse throwaways. Even the namesake tree whose blossoms some call Jesus-flowers for the rust-grooved tips of the petals as if nails now removed had indented the shape of a cross, betrays my mood how all those springs ago seeing our tree nailed with bloody after bloody crucifix I said this beauty's no foo-foo and sure enough my dog-weary dearie mowing today, the spring long gone, I brush a limb on whose tired leaves mites amble the edible thoroughfares and as if to confirm it, our neighbor's mutt runs along the fence yapping dogwood dogwood dogwood as the mower chugs on, our train leaving for the city beneath the grass.

either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments either the low breeze through the cracked window or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter:      we're done with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what's eternal picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells this is the sum of us:      brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth's surface, one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope: first, a congregated light, the brilliance of a meadowland in bloom and then the image must fail, as we must fail, as we graceless creatures that we are, unmake and befoul our beds don't tell me deluge.      don't tell me heat, too damned much heat

Sing, cuccu, nu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu. Sumer is i-cumin in— Lhude sing, cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And springth the wude nu. Sing, cuccu! Awe bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calve cu, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth— Murie sing, cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, Wel singes thu, cuccu. Ne swik thu naver nu!

Homage to Morton Feldman “Before the oracle, with the flowers” —1 Kings 7:49 1 Here in the gloaming, a wormwood haze — the “m” on its head, a “w,” amazed at what the drink itself does: Vermouth, god bless you — th. 2 What really matters now is begonia, he thought, distracted while reading — their amber anther and bone-white petals missing from a jade pot by the door — not a theory of metaphor. 3 In this corner, sweet alyssum. And beside it fragrant jessamine. Almost rhyming scents in the air — a syntax weaving their there, there. 4 Erodium holds an eye in the pink looping the white of its tendering cup. 5 The blue moon opens all too quickly and floats its head- y fragrance over the path before us: And so we slit its throat, like a florist. 6 These hearts-on-strings of the tenderest green things that rise from dirt, then fall toward the floor, hang in the air like — hearts- on-strings of the tenderest green things — they rise from dirt then fall toward the floor, hanging in the air like — these hearts-on-strings of the tenderest green things, rising from dirt then falling toward the floor, hanging in the air like 7 Moss-rose, purslane, portulaca petals feeling for the sun’s light or is it only warmth or both (they need to open) an amethyst almost see-through shift 8 Bou- gainvillea lifts the sinking spirit back up and nearly into a buoyancy — its papery pink bracts proving with their tease of a rustle and glow through the window — there is a breeze. 9 Epistle-like chicory blue beyond the bars of these beds suspended in air, (what doesn’t dangle?) elsewhere, gives way to plugged in, pez- purply thyme, against a golden (halo’s) thistle. 10 What’s a wandering Jew to you two, who often do wonder about that moving about? Its purple stalk torn-off and stuck elsewhere in the ground takes root and soon shoots forth a bluish star with powder on its pistil. Such is the power of that Jew, wherever it goes (unlike the rose), to make itself new.

It’s ripe, the melon by our sink. Yellow, bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes the house too sweetly. At five I wake, the air mournful in its quiet. My wife’s eyes swim calmly under their lids, her mouth and jaw relaxed, different. What is happening in the silence of this house? Curtains hang heavily from their rods. Ficus leaves tremble at my footsteps. Yet the colors outside are perfect-- orange geranium, blue lobelia. I wander from room to room like a man in a museum: wife, children, books, flowers, melon. Such still air. Soon the mid-morning breeze will float in like tepid water, then hot. How do I start this day, I who am unsure of how my life has happened or how to proceed amid this warm and steady sweetness?

The dogs eat hoof slivers and lie under the porch. A strand of human hair hangs strangely from a fruit tree like a cry in the throat. The sky is clay for the child who is past being tired, who wanders in waist-deep grasses. Gnats rise in a vapor, in a long mounting whine around her forehead and ears. The sun is an indistinct moon. Frail sticks of grass poke her ankles, and a wet froth of spiders touches her legs like wet fingers. The musk and smell of air are as hot as the savory terrible exhales from a tired horse. The parents are sleeping all afternoon, and no one explains the long uneasy afternoons. She hears their combined breathing and swallowing salivas, and sees their sides rising and falling like the sides of horses in the hot pasture. At evening a breeze dries and crumbles the sky and the clouds float like undershirts and cotton dresses on a clothesline. Horses rock to their feet and race or graze. Parents open their shutters and call the lonely, happy child home. The child who hates silences talks and talks of cicadas and the manes of horses.